Agreed, it's not just tech companies. I've seen where quite a few verticals have agreed with their peers not to poach which ultimately drives down wages. These kinds of agreements including non-compete employee contracts need to be abolished once and for all. I was hit one time by being offered a position at another company only to find out that they had a no-poach agreement with the company I was working for. It would have been a nice bump in salary too. About six months after that incident I left anyway for another opportunity.

Agreed, it's not just tech companies. I've seen where quite a few verticals have agreed with their peers not to poach which ultimately drives down wages..

They can agree all they want, but judging by the feverish recruiter calls/emails (and not a few internal HR-generated ones from some really big corps)? When the labor market is tight, all rules are off the table.

Dunno about you, but the nanosecond my job title and duties officially included "DevOps", things got evil in my inbox and voicemail in a hurry.

I work in a three man devops department. For months we've been short a man. Last friday the other guy quit without notice. So it's now just me running a three man department with limited hope of filling the two empty slots in the immediate future. There are lots of system admins around, but not a lot of them have advanced devops experience.

We're in a similar situation in our build/release group. The problem is that they want senior level talent at junior level wages, and until they can find such a sucker^Wcandidate, we continue to do without.

I was planning on suggesting this to my boss. Since we can't fill a senior level position, let's at least get a junior or mid level tech. It will reduce the work load on me somewhat, even if he (or she) can't handle the more complicated problems. And if the person is smart enough, he could quickly become proficient in the tools we are planning on implementing over the next year.

Devops is a buzzword. Before we had all kinds of fancy automation tools, we used sed, awk, grep, bash and expect scripts. You shouldn't have to train a sys admin to be a devops engineer. If a sys admin knows their shit, develops is the natural progression. IMHO, the kids who are sysadmins and too young to know life before ports/apt/yum, need a week of compiling it from source training. Isn't devops sysadmin+python?

I don't know why we call our economy free-market, when regular people don't get a chance to participate in a free way

Because the people who keep braying about the 'free market' are incapable of understanding that it's a purely theoretical construct which has never existed, and which will always be abused by the players -- thereby wiping out most of the claimed benefits we'd get from it.

The free market is an ideology, which means it is defended the same way -- loudly, uncritically, ignoring the problems with

Life? Bah, make me dictator for 8 years and I could straighten out the US. 8 years and then a peaceful transition back to a Democracy after everyone is back on equal footing in the eyes of the law. Really, only easy stuff needs to get done. Take money out of politics, codify a no national security clause to avoid the constitution, put term limits on supreme court justices, remove the ability of lawmakers to exempt themselves, and establish that corporations are not people in respect to rights granted them,

Don't forget to outlaw any government agency ever knowingly releasing false information to the public and I suggest making it a mandatory life sentence without parole for elected federal politicians; appointed bureaucrats; and military personnel above a certain level of officer rank. You can't have a legitimate democracy if the government is actively lying to the public in order to control public opinion. A democracy can only ever hope to be legitimate if the voters have as close to an unfiltered view of

*nod* communism and capitalism, as pure forms, suffer from the same basic flaw which results in them being nearly indistinguishable when actually implemented in practice. Ideologues judge their systems based on the best case scenario and how much better things would be, but the real value in a system is how resilient it is to things NOT being ideal and how much impact corruption can have.

Who calls our economy "free market"? The only free markets I see are the exchanges (commodities and stock exchanges), which are "free" in the important sense of "no government price fixing" (except a couple of agricultural commodities, but that's now rare), but still have plently of market regulations. The key is: the price isn't what's regulated, it's mostly fraud prevention and assurance that you can pay what you owe.

The labor market in America is still reasonably free, however - in this case these are w

In actual economic models and historical records, yes, increasing wages almost always has a positive effect on the economy as a whole. The problem with things like raising wages is largely political/philosophical. It is kinda strange in that it is one of those areas where 'bleeding hearts' and 'realpolitik' overlap.

Increasing the pay of everyone is no different than changing the exchange rate of the currency, IMO.

But either way, that money to increase pay (non-trivially) doesn't exist. What's the fair share of distributions of gross earnings between workers, owners, and the government? Corporate taxes are a different argument, but the remainder gets split about 80% workers, 20% owners in successful large companies, and 105% workers, -5% owners frequently happens in struggling small businesses, at least short term.

What does "being held by corporations" mean? Do you mean that the debt burden of companies is low and the cash reserves of those who have them is high? That's what the bottom of a recession looks like: the companies simply don't see a way to invest for growth, and want to be sure that they make payroll if things get worse. Seems OK to me, but then I hate bailouts.

Or do you feel that a company with a danger-reserve of cash should just pay everyone a one-time bonus, and hope for the best? You certainly do

You are right about corporate debt – except that the amount of cash being horded by companies today, as a percentage of their assets, is much higher than at the same point in other recessions. A rainy day fund is one thing. CEOs hording cash to further their ends – and not the corporations – is something else.Also, when profits increase the profits tend to be split between the workers and the stockholders (capital). What is interesting is that in this reco

This is the worst recession since the Great Depression, plus "QE Infinity" is a new thing sharply distorting many markets. You can't expect recovery to look normal. I believe that once we get some nice inflation going, and the Fed stops being the only real buyer of government debt, we'll come around very quickly to a normal recovery pattern.

In any case, it's worth noting that if the value of all publically traded companies were evenly distributed among all workers, each share would be roughly similar to a

I am concerned about a permanent shift. I am concerned that we are facing a permanent drop in GDP growth from 3% to 2% which implies wealth (capital) will become more concentrated. (FYI it also implies that you should have 8 times the capital to your wage.) I fear that IT is allowing the elites to leverage their skills resulting in a hollowing out of the middle class. These are larger, slower trends then the current recession but I fear

> I believe that once we get some nice inflation goingSorry but it's not going to happen. As economist Paul Krugman points out - the econ101 story of the government who printed money and caused hyperinflation has zero actual truth to it- in the real world that has NEVER happened. Hyperinflation can happen in large money-printing times but ONLY when accompanied by severe political chaos that destroys production - this is what happened in Zimbabwe (long before there was hyperinflation there was farm ceisur

Investment returns are only GDP growth plus whatever risk premium. If GDP growth slows by 1/3, overall investment income is going to drop by roughly 1/3, but you wouldn't expect salaries to drop by 1/3. When someone says "the evil rich are hollowing out the middle class", I figure he's selling something.

Individual companies can get up to all sorts of shenanigans (that's what makes investing as challenging as working). But if you bought $60k (or whatever it works out to be, but that's close) of a broad bas

I am not sure if I am selling anything. Well, maybe tax reform to simplify the code and improving our school system, in particular at the primary level. And then there is this, the upper end if sprinting a lot faster than the middle or lower quintiles.

So let me ask you a question - why did you pick that a person should have stocks equal to his income? Could some of difference be that you are looking at the individual level (what 1 person should do) while I am looking more

Thought experiment. A company has a market cap of 20m, outstanding debts of 80k. The company then issues 10m in bonds for a stock buyback. Now they have a market cap of 10m with outstanding debts of 90k. Did the worth of the company drop in Â½? I would say no. (Or they could go the other way and issue equity to pay off the debt.)

This never actually happens, is the thing - at least, not with any company large enough to matter to the financial press. Such shenanigans would be quite newsworthy. Companies do stock buybacks with excess cash as a marketing thing when they're trying to convince people the stock is undervalued (or to protect against hostile takeover - cash reserves entice takeover) , but it's a 5% thing at best. Very strange exchanges of stock for debt sort of like you describe do actually happen, but only as a last desp

Paul Krugman said the opposite when a republican was president. Funny how that works.

Idiots aside, inflation will come when people start buying. Demand gives companies pricing power, and that with some lag gives wage inflation to match. This is all playing out very normally now for economic recovery (if slower than usual), with sales of durable goods leading the way.

Plus, I'm not so sure the Fed has been actually "printing money" (meaningfully increasing the money supply) in QE Infinity, because while th

I think some of our difference comes down to what a company is worth (assets) vs. ownership (equity). I will stand on the point that if you hold bonds (liability) you hold capital in the company, and this thread was kicked off on people holding capital.

As to your points, we may be talking about semantics. Banks constantly play around with this number, trying to be as leveraged as the regulators will allow. This is what private equity does all of the time. And CFOs do

Corporations are better at saving and investing than individuals. The investments made today is what is going to raise a worker’s productivity tomorrow. A worker’s productivity is one of the prime factors in determining their pay.

Or maybe consumers will take their pay increase and use that to pay down their debt – which is what people have been doing since the housing market blew up.

Corporations are better at saving and investing than individuals. The investments made today is what is going to raise a worker’s productivity tomorrow. A worker’s productivity is one of the prime factors in determining their pay.

umm what? the only interest a corporation has in increasing worker productivity is to hire fewer workers and save money. maybe 10 jobs transition to 1 job + computers + machines, but that only happens if the corporation is overall paying out less.

Remember, total corporate profits in the US are less than 10% of total wages in the US. "Evil big corporations" are certainly paying as little as they can get away with, but there's not much slack there in the first place. It's not like, on average, we could be paid 20% more if our collective bosses was only more generous - that money just doesn't exist (and small companies are on far thinner margins here - making payroll is a monthly uncertainly for most).

Why must salary increases for workers be sourced from existing profits ? Why could they not be sourced by reducing the ridiculous pay packages of upper and executive management ?

Regular workers vastly outnumber management. Pay of C*O level people at S&P 500 companies is generally a decimal of their total expenses, so axing their pay really won't change much for the average worker.

Even if, and that's a big if, their pay is only a decimal percentage of their expenditures, I still say do it. Using percentages in this argument is smoke and mirrors. If you say it's only 0.1% well that doesn't sound like much at all does it? But when an absolute figure is thrown out there we see the real picture. Say just one CxO's pay is $500k. 5 Hundred Thousand is a fuck load of money for most people. If that company got a work contract for 500k they'd be partying like it's 1999! But then they w

After years of appeals, attempts to bury the employees in mounds of paperwork and bleed them dry on legal fees.

Uhh... this is a class action lawsuit. The employees don't have to do any paperwork, and their legal fees will be precisely ZERO. That is the way class action lawsuits work. The lawyers take all the risk (and also reap much of the rewards).

They'll just say that the legislators made the law, and nobody *made* them do it. And since the employers are not the legislators, the employers are not at fault. Its *technically* true but its still a dick move. I really don't know of any good way to hold weasels down long enough to smack them with the hammer of honesty.

Ah yes, if we could just return to that blessed world before the government imposed all those restrictions on people who wanted to conduct business. I mean it's not like corporations have all kinds of benefits people don't have, but are getting all the rights of people....

Corporations were created by governments, so they woudln't even exist in a free market.

Cite one historical example of a free market existing, and working as advertised.

Bonus points if it doesn't also correspond with slavery, serfs, colonialism, special exemptions from kings or governments, or general examples of how the 'free market' gets manipulated to benefit the wealthy. If you can't, then the whole idea of introducing one is founded on the belief that if we could only create it, it would work, no matte

And that friend pays no taxes on income or acquiring the equipment or raw materials to make the pots? (or I should say, is not required to pay taxes but tax evasion with the risk of fines or prison is still not a true "free market")

Oh, and someone literally just sends "cash" on craigslist? Bullshit. Probably Paypal or a check/money order/etc. Which are all also regulated in some way.

Cite one historical example of a free market existing, and working as advertised.

A free market is what people do when no-one holds a gun to their head forcing them to do something else.

And I don't see what your rant has to do with my point, that corporations themselves wouldn't exist in a free market. Big business exists because of big government, and neither could exist without the other.

Statists demand bigger and more powerful government, then complain when that results in bigger and more powerful corporations. This just proves they're not very smart.

Why am I unsurprised? You keep talking about what would happen in a free market, but you have no actual evidence or examples of how one of those would work, just a theoretical abstraction. You just keep saying if we had it, it would fix all of these things, but you can cite no proof or examples of it.

that corporations themselves wouldn't exist in a free market

And the reality is, a free market would not exist in a free market. It would always be subjec

Cite one historical example of a free market existing, and working as advertised.

There probably are no examples. But his point that Corporations don't exist in a free market is still valid.

Capitalism is just entrenching greed and ownership as a belief system

That's certainly one way to look at it. Humans respond to incentives, at its heart capitalism is a system that attempts to provide incentive for hard work, innovation, and risk taking. Greed can corrupt it the same as greed can corrupt any other system, which is why we have governments and regulations.

There probably are no examples. But his point that Corporations don't exist in a free market is still valid.

No, it's really not. You guys need to brush up on your economics if you are going to keep throwing around "free market" as an *economic term*. A free market economy means basic supply and demand are controlled by the market, not regulated by a government. It has nothing to do with corporations per se, which were created as a form of limited *liability*.

A free market exists wherever people are buying and selling voluntarily without coercion. They work remarkably well as long as you accept that 'work' in this context simply means facilitating exchanges that leave both parties better off.

If by a historical example of a free market you mean a time and place where every market, without exception, was completely and utterly free of coercion then yes, that's difficult to point to. But you are rather missing the point.

Uh, the definitions of "free market" I know include such annoying details like "informed buyers", which unfortunately already makes this whole thing quite an utopia instead of something real.

> The free-er the market is, the better it functions

Not without the "informed buyers", it rather becomes a "lemon market", i.e. a market where only the cheapest product sells since nobody can assess the quality, which then drives down the quality etc. and rather results in a market collapse.I guess you could consider

I have a libertarian friend with whom I am always arguing. His general contention is that the free market fixes everything, and government regulation and oversight only gets in the way of the free market. I argue that this may or may not be true, but that's it's really irrelevant, because there is no such thing IRL as the "free market," never has been and never will be.

This is just the sort of story that highlights what I mean by that. Left to their own devices, companies that are supposed to compete on a l

It's intended to keep salaries down, no mistake, and that's probably first among the reasons for it.'Workplace stability' is a polite term for 'OMG we don't manage our staff well enough to have some redundancy and we allow ourselves to let people to become SPOFs' - and the average nontechnical corporate manager's response to this is to resort to underhanded means to retain staff and keep costs down.There's nothing about this that actually benefits the worker.

It might be difficult to prove the INTENT of the "no poaching" agreement was to suppress wages. Unless any of the defendants were stoopid enough to refer to such in emails or other discoverable documentation.

How can it not suppress wages? Do you really think Joe Programmer will earn less if three other companies want to hire him, or if those three companies collude together to not hire each others' employees?

They have a demonstrably anti-competitive agreement between purchasers of a service to make each seller only able to deal with one of the purchasers, creating a monopsony. Textbook macro basically argues that the effect of a monopsony is that the only buyer in the market now has basically complete control of the terms of any agreement with the seller, because the seller's only option is to not sell his product.

Another way of describing this: Imagine you work for Amazon. Without these agreements, you have these options:1. Accept a 3% raise to continue working at Amazon.2. Accept a 25% raise to go work for Google.3. Not work at all and be unemployed or at least accept a massive wage cut.

With these agreements your options now are:1. Accept a 3% raise to continue working at Amazon.2. Not work at all and be unemployed or at least accept a massive wage cut.

This is inherent in these kind of agreements. There's no need to prove intent.

The agreement was not to reach out and poach others' workers. It wasn't to refuse to hire them. You still had the option of getting a 25% raise to go to Google, all you have to do is apply to Google.

The agreement didn't reduce the options available to people, it just made it so the engineer had to take the first step, the recruiter wouldn't call you to entice you.

With the exception of my first job and one time that I relocated, every job I have ever had was offered to me when I wasn't even looking for work. I am confident that my next job will probably be offered to me by an ex-coworker, a friend of a friend, or someone else who knows I will be an asset their company and has enough money or interesting enough work to entice me away from my current employer. My current employer did the exact same thing so it wouldn't catch them by surprise. If you aren't constantly worried that your employees are going to jump ship, it is either because you are compensating them very well or you have crap employees.

If you are doing things right, by your 30s employers will be coming to you not the other way around. If there are agreements out there stopping companies from reaching out to me with job offers that would certainly reduce my opportunities.

Also consider the horrendous difficulty of getting through automated HR scanner processes [consumerist.com]. You have to win Buzzword Bingo, and then you have to be matched to a position the company is actively looking to fill.

That's a nerve-wracking experience in the best of times; however, if you've got somebody inside the company actively tracking your application status and staying on the HR people not to let it fall through the cracks, that's a big benefit to your sanity and your chances of successfully landing a new

Me too. I've not had to do a serious job hunt for a long time; technical people of a certain level are in relative demand compared to other skillsets.

The practice of poaching employees to acquire needed skillsets, and employees benefitting from higher salaries as a result of this competition, is an old and honorable practice in the tech industry. This is an attempt to undermine competition and so the libertarians here should be cheering for the plaintiffs to win....anything else is inconsistent with a fre

I was somewhat surprised when the wind direction changed in my case. Not 5 years ago, I was scrambling, applying for jobs that paid peanuts, etc. These days, I get 3-5 emails/calls/etc. from recruiters per week, offering a lot more than I'd ever thought of making 5 years ago -- and I'm "happily" employed at the moment. I'm 29 now, so I guess I beat your assertion by a year:p The real question is, where would I be if I had my head on straight right out of HS, instead of bumbling around for 5 years or s

The agreement was not to reach out and poach others' workers. It wasn't to refuse to hire them. You still had the option of getting a 25% raise to go to Google, all you have to do is apply to Google.

The agreement didn't reduce the options available to people, it just made it so the engineer had to take the first step, the recruiter wouldn't call you to entice you.

Assume this is true: people still got paid less because Google didn't call them and offer the 25% raise.

To come at it from a different angle: why did the companies discuss and agree to this, if not to save money? If they want to argue that it was *only* to reduce turnover... well why did they think people would leave? Because they'd be offered better salary or compensation.

I know Google is fond of buying up companies but I was not aware they had bought ALL of them.

Because otherwise your whole argument falls to pieces when you realize that someone can leave Amazon/Google/Apple and work at ANY OTHER COMPANY. Often with VC funding paying huge salaries. So in what way does a gentleman's agreement not to poach drive down wages?

Furthermore, the agreement was not to SEEK OUT employees of those other companies - they can always move between companies of their own volition. So in

It's a little more complicated than that. The issue is match quality between workers and firms. Match quality increases over a worker's tenure at a firm (as they learn the systems / practices / whatever). To better model the issue you'll want to include training costs and long term contracts.

For example, it won't work out if a firm trains workers and then those workers just find better jobs, so one solution is long term contracts. Long term contracts may be forbidden, so firms need other ways to reta

The case evolves around a comment made by Appleâ(TM)s late-CEO Steve Jobs to Palmâ(TM)s CEO: âoeWe must do whatever we can to stop cold calling each otherâ(TM)s employees and other competitive recruiting efforts between the companies.â

Copied directly from the article. No logic needed. No need to prove intent because It's right there in the comments at the core of the entire case.

I do agree that these whiny millennials could do the normal thing and occasionally look for other options and therefore lost nothing, but the law does not look favorably on anticompetitive practice, so that statement is pretty much all they needed.

112. The DOJ also determined that the agreements “were not ancillary to any legitimate collaboration,” “were much broader than reasonably necessary for the formation or implementation of any collaborative effort,” and “disrupted the normal price-setting mechanisms that apply in the labor setting.”

It might be difficult to prove the INTENT of the "no poaching" agreement was to suppress wages. Unless any of the defendants were stoopid enough to refer to such in emails or other discoverable documentation.

What other purpose could "no poaching" agreements possibly have? Their only purpose is so a company does not have to pay a salary high enough and/or create a work environment good enough to keep the employee from leaving.

It might be difficult to prove the INTENT of the "no poaching" agreement was to suppress wages.

The legal standard for civil cases is on the "preponderance of the evidence", i.e. the proposition is more likely to be true than not. If it transpires before the court that the intent of the "no poaching" agreement might have been promoting gentlemanly conduct in HR, might have been based on the belief that employees become more productive the longer they have been in a team, but probably was to drive down wages, then the judge must rule in favour of the plaintiff.

Per the Holy Market rules, it's your job to ask your boss for more money (it's better if you deserve it and your company is making a profit).It's fun to point and laugh when the NHL/NBA/MLB go on strike over salaries, but as all valuable employees of very profitable corporations, they have the right to ask for their cut (and these guys can't exactly find multi-million contracts elsewhere).Be valuable, get paid well. You sound more whiny than they do.

...Or do they simply have circumstantial evidence? For, if the companies got into a pact via a "gentleman's agreement" - an agreement not written down on paper and not recorded in speech anywhere, potential employees will have a tough time proving their case.

Years ago when I was doing jobbie work I found out that the job shops in the Detroit Metro area had a similar agreement not to hire people working for other job shops. It was a kind of a "Don't piss in your neighbors backyard" thing. Turns out a lot more companies are doing this in a lot more places than you might guess. Can anyone say "slave labor?". This kind of thing starts out in the board rooms and propagates down to the hiring floor, not the other way around. This is a very revealing insight into

Every year the HR people would make presentations to us about how they got together with HR people from other big engineering companies in the valley and decided upon job descriptions and pay and benefits packages, and by the way decided that the COL raise this year would be X%.

My coworkers, most of whom were oblivious to the big picture, would cheer at the annual pay raise and I would grumble about the salary fixing that they were proudly presenting.

I work at one of these companies mentioned and have a friend who is a manager at one of the other companies. I actually asked once a few years back about a position I saw and he said he didn't think that they could hire people from my company when I asked if he wanted to submit my resume for the position in the other group. So there are examples both ways.
Couple years later and this wasn't even mentioned. So it did exist in some form at some point. I never moved jobs in the last 12 years though so I a